In 3/4, a trembling question

In counterpoint to debates on littérature-monde, I outline the emergence of Mediterranean literature, uniquely positioned as a concept to productively break with old frustrations over globalizing universalist tendencies, and the French/francophone divide. The modern Mediterranean selectively striates and structures a detotalitizing literature whose self-consciousness creatively prolongs the composite genealogies and trajectories of preand early modern texts, histories, and ideas to the present day. While ambiguous and contradictory modes of discourse abound on and in the Mediterranean, Mediterranean literature diverges aesthetically in its avoidance of the norms of writing back in the critical, resistive political traditions to decolonize French and francophone literary prose. It seeks illogical, poetic alternatives instead. It attempts to reconcile prosody and prose with a deep, archaic poetic archive that stretches from twentiethcentury post-structuralism, structuralism, and earlier avant-gardist intellectual modes, further back to early Islamic ritual, and even pre-Islamic poetics. Its dominant thrust shifts attention toward a poetry-centric swerve across the entirety of the modern Mediterranean’s textual-literary littoral. In its wake, in the light of the potential intertextual openings it instigates, an immense literary transhistoricity and translinguistic divergence emerges, which short-circuits polemical identity politics and (trans)nationalist-linguistic reflexes to inscribe and understand literature. Through an unfolding of the notions of illogic, indefinition, innumerability, enigma, mobility, emergence, resonance, and the dichromatic in works by Salah Stétié, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Abdelwahab Meddeb, I am able to present an illustration of what a close reading of a prototypical piece of modern Mediterranean literature may resemble

Art · Comparative literature · Epistemology · Literary criticism · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Politics · Structuralism (philosophy of science) · African history and culture analysis · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Philosophy